One of the lesser known, yet very cool features of Google Docs is its ability to provide a pretty decent translation of any text you enter into it. The functionality highlights the progress that has been made in machine translation in recent years. Indeed, work earlier this year suggested that machine translation is now on a par with humans.
Whilst this is certainly very cool and those results garnered a lot of publicity, it shouldn’t be taken to mean that human translators are heading for the scrap heap just yet. A recent study published by the University of Zurich highlights some of the reasons why.
